How to be, to long, and to belong, when AI keeps getting in the way
I spend a lot of time with young people. (I swear it keeps me young!) Whether through the everyday chaos of our home, with my daughters and their friends spending time around my kitchen table, mentoring through tech programmes, or interviewing for my next book, we talk about what occupies their thoughts, what concerns them, and what excites them about the future. What comes up most often is not AI or digital skills, but relationships: how to communicate, how to be understood, and how to find a place to belong.
Image of Shakespeare holding a skull from Wonderopolis.org
The word belonging. I’m hearing it used more and more, but what does it mean? Especially when so much of our “human” is being automated, augmented, and now done autonomously through machines. For me, it holds three ideas: to be, to long, and to belong.
To be is to exist with awareness. It is the ability to be present honestly, to notice, to choose, and to stay grounded in experience, even when certainty is out of reach.
To long is to feel a pull towards something absent. It is the quiet ache of desire, hope, or memory that points to what matters, drawing our attention beyond the immediate moment.
To belong means more than to be included. It is to be accepted without the need to explain or perform. It is the experience of being seen and valued as one is, in relationship to others and to oneself.
Seen this way (and completely subjectively), belonging is not a destination, a status, or something that can be mimicked or bought. It emerges where presence, longing, and connection meet, where we continue to show up with one another, make room for difference, and allow belonging to be practised again and again, rather than achieved once and shelved.
This matters more, not less, as machines are increasingly able to do what people can do. If being is reduced to presence within a system, and longing is redirected towards efficiency, relevance, or optimisation, we risk losing core elements of what it means to belong. AI can perform tasks, generate language, and simulate understanding, but it does not experience being, nor does it long, and therefore it cannot belong.
But we do. Humans exist with awareness, we feel absence, and we are shaped by what we hope for and what we miss. Belonging holds these parts together. It reminds us that being human is not defined by what we produce or compete on, but by our ability to remain present, to care about what is not yet here, and to recognise one another without performance.
In an age where competence is increasingly shared with machines and decisions are based on data, belonging protects what cannot be trained through mathematical models. It preserves the need to be seen rather than processed, to be in relationship rather than in comparison. Belonging is where being and longing are allowed to coexist, and where humanity remains distinct, not because of what we can do, but because of how we are with ourselves and with one another.
As we wrap up 2025 and sit at the edge of the wide, open, unknown of 2026, I hope you can find moments to be, to long, and to belong, with loved ones and your community, and, ideally, plenty of chocolate, laughter, and a (few) crazy night(s) of dancing!
We’ve got a busy year ahead of active belonging.
Happy holidays,
Kate
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